They Can't Kill Us All

by Wesley Lowery

  Mitchell hit Cleveland like a whirlwind, deciding he would attend every single City Council meeting. Once he began to ask questions, he soon took over his own public affairs radio show. Then he launched a concert and performance art series: Ohio Homecoming. His goal was to showcase the talent in his hometown.

  He dreamed of one day entering politics himself, perhaps crafting a ticket of all young people to run for various city positions, so he reached out to several city officials, proposing that they set up a mentorship program for young adults hoping to enter public service. He got a hard no.

  “No one is going to teach you,” he recalled being told by one prominent official. “Power is never given, it’s taken.” It is an open secret that there exists a conflict between a new generation of young black leadership and a black establishment reluctant to give up the power they spent decades fighting to secure. Activists young and old, as well as some local elected officials and other observers of local politics, all acknowledge that perhaps one of the things holding this Midwestern city back is the ongoing tension between different generations of black leadership.

  “We’ve had a history of black political leadership at the highest level; there has always been a high level of black political engagement here,” Ronnie Dunn, a criminal justice professor at Cleveland State University who has for years studied the Cleveland police department, told me as I sat in his office. “There is certainly a group of us, myself included, who fall into what is short of a black managerial class, who in some way or another are part of the system.”

  According to journalist Ari Berman, whose book Give Us the Ballot tracks the battle for voting rights in the five decades after the Voting Rights Act, the percentage of black registered voters in the South more than doubled—skyrocketing from 31 percent to 73 percent—between 1965 and 2005. When the legislation became law in 1965, there were fewer than 500 black elected officials in the nation. By 2015, there were more than 10,500. The number of black members of Congress had grown from 5 to 43. And there was no victory brought about by the Voting Rights Act bigger, or more consequential, than the 2008 election of Barack Obama. The civil rights generation had fought for equality at the ballot box, rightly recognizing that the right to vote was an essential tool in the broader fight for equality of experience.

  In fifty years America had gone from being a country in which a black man named Barack Obama would likely have been unable to cast a ballot for president to a country in which he was elected president.

  “Obama’s unprecedented election gave rise to the hope that America had become a postracial society,” historian Gary May wrote in Bending Toward Justice, his 2013 history of the Voting Rights Act. “But the nation is not as different as it may seem. History reveals that improved conditions come less from a revolution in white attitudes toward African-Americans than from the [Voting Rights Act’s] effectiveness in altering electoral conditions. In other words, if the Act had never existed, there is no guarantee that Mississippi would have so many black public officials or, for that matter, any at all….

  “…And ironically it was Obama’s election itself that indicated that race, for many, remained a divisive issue.”

  In the early days after Ferguson, many asked when the young activists would begin holding voter registration drives, but that question in and of itself betrayed an old way of thinking. “Why vote?” I remember one young activist asking me. “Having a black president didn’t keep the police from killing Mike Brown.”

  During a forum moderated by PBS’s Gwen Ifill not long after the shooting, local rap artist and activist Tef Poe rejected the suggestion by Senator Claire McCaskill, a Democrat, that getting out the vote was the first step toward fixing Ferguson’s systemic issues. “The lack of trust that is so palpable right now…the way to fix that is to make the government look more like them,” McCaskill said, prompting Tef Poe to ask, “What do you say to those of us who are” involved in the political process already?

  In a post-Ferguson world, young black activists were eager to work outside the system. “I voted for Barack Obama twice,” Tef Poe said that evening. “And still got teargassed.” A seat at the table, the new generation of black activists reasons, isn’t worth much if your fellow diners still refuse to pass you a plate.

  In the months after Tamir Rice was killed, some bridges had been built between the young activists and the established political class—both black and white. Among those meeting most frequently with the young protest organizers were several black city councilors, as well as prominent local professors, including Dunn, who readily self-identify as part of that black managerial class.

  “All of us are trying to push for real reform,” said Jason Eugene, a thirty-six-year-old organizer who was a key bridge between the various protest and activist factions in Cleveland. “We all want Cleveland to break this cycle.” And that spirit flowed throughout the small church basement where several dozen had gathered on the afternoon of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

  As a group of three young Hispanic men, brothers, performed a rap song they had written about police brutality, several older organizers in the audience nodded along. Minutes later, a city councilman walked in to join the gathering.

  “I never would have imagined that we would have had this much unity, and this many people, come together around addressing these issues,” said Al Porter, a veteran organizer who has worked on organizing protests around police brutality issues in Cleveland for decades. “I just wish it hadn’t taken us this long.”

  As the year came to a close, Cleveland still had a demon hovering over it: Would the officer who shot and killed Tamir Rice be charged with a crime?

  I figured the local prosecutor, Timothy McGinty, who had a reputation for being tough and who had proved willing to take on cases that others might not have prosecuted, would announce near the end of the year that there would be no charges. The bad news would be sandwiched sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when lake-effect snow might make it impossible for protests to swell to uncontrollable levels. And that’s exactly what happened.

  The case had been initially investigated by the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department, which turned its findings over to McGinty’s office. As the investigation stretched from weeks to months and eventually past the one-year mark, the Rice family and civil rights activists grew increasingly agitated, convinced that no charges for the officers were forthcoming. Why would they think otherwise?

  Most painful for the activists, even more so than the financial peril faced by the Rice family, had been the extended video of Tamir’s death, released on January 7, 2015, which showed not only the split-second shooting that took his life, but also a scene minutes later, when his sister realized that he had been hurt and raced to him, only to be tackled into the snow by one of the officers.

  “I’m sick. I’m crying,” DeRay Mckesson, the protester from Ferguson, texted me on the day the extended video footage was released. By this point, DeRay, too, had amassed tens of thousands of followers on Twitter, and sent dozens of tweets each day publicizing the latest police shooting news. “I just keep thinking about what if that was my sister running to me. It’s too much.”

  McGinty fueled their frustration by simultaneously releasing witness statements and other evidence to the press and the grand jury—an unusual move that he said was intended to provide transparency. The attorneys for Tamir’s family insisted that this move telegraphed McGinty’s intention to let the officers walk free. In the meantime, Tamir’s mother and sister found themselves in dire financial straits. “The incident has shattered the life of the Rice family,” the family’s attorneys wrote in one court filing. “In particular, Samaria Rice, Tamir Rice’s mother, has since been forced to move to a homeless shelter because she could no longer live next door to the killing field of her son.”

  Providing for the Rice family quickly became a priority for many of the young activists associated with the broader protest movement, not just in Cleveland, but across
the country. Among those who most aggressively sought to intervene on their behalf was Shaun King, an author and life coach turned activist who, during the early days of Ferguson, built an online following of hundreds of thousands.

  King had long seen himself as a racial justice activist, involved in both politics and activism since his days in student government at Morehouse College in the late 1990s. But, he recalled for me later, it was the death of Michael Brown that awakened him to the extent of police violence.

  “If you asked me before Ferguson where the two poles of police brutality were, I would have told you Los Angeles and New York. I knew about Rodney King, and Amadou Diallo, and Abner Louima and Sean Bell,” King told me. “These stories from New York and LA, even before social media, always got told. It created in me an impression that police brutality was at its worst in those two places. I didn’t know how bad it was in other places because I wasn’t reading the newspaper in St. Louis.”

  In 2014 King was working as the social media director for an environmental charity when someone emailed him a link to the video of Eric Garner’s death in New York.

  “I made up my mind right there at my desk…that I was going to share this video everywhere, and that somebody was going to be arrested,” King told me. “I was posting it on Facebook and Twitter.… I was so obsessed with it that I thought I was going to lose my actual job; all I was doing was researching this case.”

  Then, several weeks later, King got a private message on Twitter. A young black man had been killed by the police in a town called Ferguson.

  “I typed ‘Ferguson’ in my search box and sure as hell there are photos of a kid lying in the street,” King said. “I was like: oh my gosh, the police are killing folks everywhere.”

  King partnered with Feminista Jones, a social worker, activist, and feminist writer, to raise more than sixty thousand dollars to give to the Rice family soon after Tamir’s death. The fundraiser was signed off on by an uncle, but there was a miscommunication, leading some to publicly question whether or not King and Jones had the authorization of the family.

  Timothy Kucharski had been one of two attorneys representing the Rice family for several weeks when he got a call from a friend in early December, asking about an online fundraiser in the Rice name. As the funds raised surpassed twenty-seven thousand dollars, Kucharski contacted law enforcement as well as YouCaring.com, the site being used to raise the money, asking that assets donated to the fund be seized and held for the Rice family. He contacted King, who has previously used his social media following to raise money for victims of police shootings and natural disasters, and who insisted that his plan was always to give the money to the family. As they went back and forth, a number of Twitter users began insisting that the fundraiser was a scam and demanding it be halted.

  It didn’t help that King had become one of the most frequent targets of vitriol among political opponents of the protest movement. The backlash was in part his own doing. He had a complicated work history, which included time as a pastor, a motivational speaker, and a fundraiser. His posts on Twitter and Facebook were emotionally and rhetorically charged. He leveraged his presence to drive attention to overlooked cases and to disseminate small but important updates about the best-known police shootings. But King also had a propensity to play a bit fast and loose with facts and to fall into profane, aggressive arguments with media personalities, other activists, and political enemies. Here was the darker side of the immediacy and expedience afforded by social media.

  In the hands of the movement’s political enemies, legitimate criticisms about King and others snowballed into a barrage of personal attacks and hate. While many had “raised questions,” the worst accusations ever substantiated against King related to inaccuracies in his online dispatches and irregularities in the financials of the nonprofit organizations he had previously led. While some argued that he had stolen money he had raised for the families of victims of police violence, several investigations into those allegations found nothing of substance.

  When professional attacks didn’t silence King, conservative blogs and writers began to attack him personally—culminating in a sustained weeklong effort to prove that King, a biracial man, was in fact white and had been lying about his race for his entire adult life.

  After a week of constant articles and tweets from conservative websites like Breitbart and the Daily Caller, King was forced to publicly acknowledge that he was born as the result of his white mother’s decades-earlier affair with a black man.

  “The reports about my race, about my past, and about the pain I’ve endured are all lies. My mother is a senior citizen. I refuse to speak in detail about the nature of my mother’s past, or her sexual partners, and I am gravely embarrassed to even be saying this now, but I have been told for most of my life that the white man on my birth certificate is not my biological father and that my actual biological father is a light-skinned black man,” King wrote in a piece that he published online at the Daily Kos, encouraged by me and others. “This has been my lived reality for nearly thirty of my thirty-five years on earth. I am not ashamed of it, or of who I am—never that—but I was advised by my pastor nearly twenty years ago that this was not a mess of my doing and it was not my responsibility to fix it. It is horrifying to me that my most personal information, for the most nefarious reasons, has been forced out into the open and that my private past and pain have been used as jokes and fodder to discredit me and the greater movement for justice in America.”

  Even as the confusion spread over whether or not King’s pledge drive for Rice was legitimate, the fundraiser for the Rice family presented yet another example of the power of his online fundraising prowess. He and Jones ended up netting almost sixty thousand dollars—money that, at the request of the Rice family attorneys, was then seized by the court. The court set up a trustee to manage the funds, placing all the money in Tamir Rice’s estate, meaning any withdrawal would require a judge’s ruling. Rather than being given the money directly, the Rice family would now have to apply for each disbursement. After attorneys’ and administrative fees had been paid, more than twenty thousand dollars remained in Tamir Rice’s estate, and the family had no means of accessing it. After I wrote about this financial drama in May 2015, King announced another fundraiser—this time with the publicly stated support of the Rice family and their attorneys—and raised another twenty thousand dollars.

  “When I started that fundraiser it was all under the assumption that this is a good thing for the family.… I had grown to feel like, giving money to these families would give them the freedom to be their own advocates,” King told me later. “It still frustrates me to no end…that people were saying that I’d taken the money for Eric Garner’s and Tamir Rice’s families.”

  The controversy was crafted in part due to the media’s unique discomfort with activists who cross into journalism, as well as the public’s deep skepticism about online fundraising—a realm fraught with frauds and fakes looking to score a quick dollar in the name of those who are suffering. That skepticism was sometimes encouraged by King’s own statements and behavior. But it was also, no doubt, further emboldened by the prejudicial thinking that tells us that this bold black man yelling to the crowds must be lying—about something.

  King would ultimately take a job as a columnist for the New York Daily News, where he remains a controversial lightning rod. Detractors continue to raise questions about his past endeavors, and he continues to insist that these are coordinated smears to silence him. He remains one of the most consistent voices in the media writing and talking about police violence against black and brown bodies.

  “At the end of the day, I have a small measure of satisfaction in this sea of ugliness in that I’ve been able to tell families’ stories from the perspective of an activist, from a perspective that has been compassionate to them,” King told me. “If I’ve moved the needle even just a little bit, then it’s all been worth it.”

  On December 27, 2
015, more than a year after activists had first seen the video of the young boy’s death, prosecutor McGinty’s office announced that it was calling a press conference on the Tamir Rice case. I was in DC, following along via a live stream of the press conference when McGinty came to the podium.

  “The outcome will not cheer anyone, nor should it,” McGinty said. “The death of Tamir Rice was an absolute tragedy. But it was not, by the law that binds us, a crime.… If we put ourselves in the victim’s shoes, as prosecutors and detectives try to do, it is likely that Tamir—whose size made him look much older and who had been warned that his pellet gun might get him into trouble that day—either intended to hand it to the officers or to show them it wasn’t a real gun. But there was no way for the officers to know that, because they saw the events rapidly unfolding in front of them from a very different perspective.”

  McGinty called the shooting “this perfect storm of human error, mistakes, and miscommunications by all involved.” But, he said, he had told the members of the grand jury that he did not believe they should bring charges. When they took their final vote, they agreed.

  For activists in Cleveland and around the nation, the decision was a balled fist to the gut. Tamir Rice’s death had been the most emotional and painful of the police shootings that had gained national attention to date. Whether you faulted the officer or not, you had to accept that this was the killing of a boy, playing with a toy, in a park.

  “I don’t want my child to have died for nothing and I refuse to let his legacy or his name be ignored,” Tamir’s mother, Samaria Rice, said in a statement that landed in my in-box that day. “As the video shows, Officer Loehmann shot my son in less than a second. All I wanted was someone to be held accountable.”

  And now, after making everyone wait for more than a year, the prosecutors were saying that under the letter of the law Tamir’s death was not a crime, and that no one would be prosecuted. It would only be a matter of time before people were taking to the streets in Cleveland. As I started frantically writing and updating our online piece on the announcement, I knew we’d need to hire a freelance reporter in Cleveland to go to the protests and monitor the situation on the ground.